Last minute Christmas reading suggestions

A celebration of Australia’s current golden
age of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and magical realism. Jack Dann ‒
multi-award-winning author and co-editor of the classic Dreaming Down-Under,
the first Australian book to win a World Fantasy Award ‒ has collected a
wonderfully eclectic range of short fiction that showcases what our best
fantasists are doing right now in these genre-bending times.

Verity Fassbinder has her feet in two
worlds. The daughter of one human and one Weyrd parent, she has very little
power herself, but does claim unusual strength and the ability to walk between
us and the other as a couple of her talents. As such a rarity, she is charged
with keeping the peace between both races, and ensuring the Weyrd remain hidden
from us.

There are many grief holes. There’s the
grief hole you fall into when a loved one dies. There’s another grief hole in
all of us; small or large, it determines how much we want to live. And there
are the places, the physical grief holes, that attract suicides to their
centre.

Sol Evictus, a powerful charismatic singer,
sends a young artist into The Grief Hole to capture the faces of the teenagers
dying there. When the artist inevitably dies herself, her cousin Theresa
resolves to stop this man so many love.

Battle-scarred warrior princess Bluebell,
heir to her father’s throne, is rumoured to be unkillable. So when she learns
of a sword wrought specifically to slay her by the fearsome raven king, Hakon,
she sets out on a journey to find it before it finds her. The sword is rumoured
to be in the possession of one of her four younger sisters. But which one?

The tenth year war is coming. Carrie Welles
has survived more attacks than she can count, but each one has made her
stronger. She refuses to be a victim any more. While her nemesis, Sharley,
continues to be a threat, she works with Harris and the Aurora team to protect
the future, vowing to raise her children and fight as the soldier-mother she was
destined to be.

This dark fantasy collection features
nineteen stories, including the Australian Shadows Award-winning ‘Shadows of
the Lonely Dead’, and two stories never before published.

‘Alan Baxter is an accomplished storyteller
who ably evokes magic and menace. Whether it’s stories of ghost-liquor and
soul-draining blues, night club magicians, sinister western pastoral
landscapes, or a suburban suicide – Crow Shine has a mean bite.’—Laird
Barron, author of Swift to Chase

‘Crow Shine, by Alan Baxter, is a
sweeping collection of horror and dark fantasy stories, packed with misfits and
devils, repentant fathers and clockwork miracles. Throughout it all, Baxter
keeps his focus on the universal problems of the human experience: the search
for understanding, for justice, and for love. It’s an outstanding
book."—Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monsters

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SF quotes

"the Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture."— Iain M. Banks